Kathleen Norris, commenting on her own faith–journey, makes an
interesting comment regarding the ambivalent way in which faith and
church have come down to us. Her words:

“As its Latin root, the word `religion' is linked to the words
ligature and ligament, words having both negative and positive
connotations, offering both bondage and freedom of movement. For me,
religion is the ligament that connects me to my grandmothers, who,
representing so clearly the negative and positive aspects of the
Christian tradition, made it impossible for me to either to reject or
accept the religion wholesale. They made it unlikely that I would
settle for either the easy answers of fundamentalism or the
over–intellectualized banalities of a conventional liberal faith.
Instead, the more deeply I've re–claimed what was good in their
faith, the more they set me free to find my own way.” (Norris,
Dakota, A Spiritual Geography, N.Y., Houghton-Mifflin, 1993, p. 133.)

That's an excellent insight, given the struggle many have today in
regards to their own religious background. More and more, we see
people who are bitter about how they were raised religiously and see
the tradition that was handed them as warped, unhealthy, and
positively harmful in terms of how they feel about God and
themselves. Yet, curiously, those same people generally find
themselves incapable of simply shedding that tradition and walking
away. What happened to them in terms of religion and church has a
positive grip on them, even as they deeply resent a lot of it.

This isn't, of course, everybody's experience. Some of us have less
to resent. For myself, religiously I drew a luckier straw. Religion
and church were mediated to me with less shadow. I had good parents,
a good parish, a good school, good nuns who taught me, and good
priests who ministered the sacraments to me. In my crucial years,
growing up, I was never once thoroughly betrayed by a significant
other in terms of the faith. My parents, my teachers, and the priests
who ministered in our parish had their faults, but at the end of the
day they essentially lived out what they professed. Consequently, the
faith they handed me was credible, real, free of undue legalism and
guilt, and, very importantly, a faith that has the capacity to see
real fault and sin within the community and yet know that the grace
of the community far overrides that.

Not everyone has been so lucky. More than a few of my friends, as
well as many others that I have encountered in my ministry, have had
a very different experience. They were handed the same faith that I
was, but often with as much shadow as light. Sometimes what was
handed them was warped by harshness, guilt, authoritarianism, or an
unhealthy patriarchy. They were given the truth, but not with any
balance or purity. Worse still, sometimes they were horribly betrayed
by those who were supposed to embody trust and were left with the
message: “Do as I say but not as I do!” They were being handed the
truth and were being simultaneously betrayed. In the end this has
left them with a painful ambivalence. The truth has a divine grip on
them, even as the trauma of being betrayed or the pathology of trying
to live out a warped truth can make that grip seem like something
sick.

Hence the dilemma of many (often bitter) Christians today: “I've been
given faith and church so strongly that it's in my very DNA. I can
never leave the church, yet I can't simply accept wholesale the
tradition that's been handed me either. I can't buy the whole
package, no matter how I try. So I am left in this painful
ambivalence — I can't take the full plunge and I can't walk away
either!”

That's not a bad place to be. If you feel like that then your elders
have done their job, however imperfectly. They've given you the faith
and left you free at the same time, though that might not feel like
freedom. Tradition is meant to do exactly this — hook you enough so
that you can't just walk away from conscience and truth and yet leave
you free enough to have some critical distance. God and truth, faith
and church, never overpower nor underpower. Classical theologians and
spiritual writers have always assured us of this.

Thus religion is indeed a ligament, offering bondage and freedom,
both at the same time. Many of us have been given the Christian
tradition (faith and church) in such a way that, as Norris so aptly
puts it, we now find ourselves unable either to simply reject it
wholesale or to buy unqualifiedly the flawed version of it that was
handed to us. Where does that leave us? Where any free, adult church
or family member should want to be, stamped indelibly with the DNA of
the family, yet free enough to offer criticism in the face of the
family's faults and history.